Watching the not-so-slow death of Labour by a thousand cuts[typo] is a spectacle in turns amusing, horrifying, incredible and at times as predictable as a socialist calling everybody they disagree with ‘Tory scum’. Will they let Corbyn hang on over Christmas? Certainly the consensus seems to be that he’ll be gone after next May’s local elections, by which time Labour will be little more than a gibbering basket case, hoping to fail its Atos work capability assessment and stay on the sick forever. But it wasn’t always this way.